A report by a top mainland academic institution that suggests China is in a far healthier state than the United States and will soon overtake the world’s only superpower economically has sparked controversy, with some analysts casting doubt on it.

China’s “national health” has been better than that of the US since 2007, and its advantage will grow further from 2019, when China is expected to become the world’s biggest economy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in its first National Health Report.

National health was defined as a country’s “overall conditions … using resource sufficiency and wealth distribution as the major criteria”, Xinhua reported, without elaborating.

Describing the US as a man past his prime and China as a vigorous youngster, the report said national health was the best form of capital that China could use to surpass the US.